One of the problems of great concern in the processing of textile articles is the holding or gripping of these same articles during steps or stages which provide for the transfer of the articles between a plurality of work stations or within a same station.
For example, in the stocking-manufacturing sector, this problem relates, particularly, to the operations for turning the stockings inside-out on toe-seaming machines, so-called "toe-closers" and, more generally, to the automatic loading of stockings support members in assembly-line machines for the formation of pantyhose articles.
The devices known at present for the loading of hoses in toe-closer machines, provide for picking up the stockings held in correspondence of their elastic hem and transferring them thus held, onto the hoses wherein the toe of the articles is introduced to allow them to be turned inside-out afterwards. Following this operation, the article results most of the time with the portion of their elastic hem being folded up and this may result that, after the seaming of the toe, the article is inaccurately removed from the toe-closer's hoses and incorrectly positioned onto the shapes of machines, such as the line-closers, which occurs during the successive assembly steps for the manufacturing of pantyhose articles.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,539,924, EP 521206 and EP 508014 documents disclose devices for the automatic loading of articles on toe-closers and on assembling machines for pantyhose formation.
The devices disclosed in the above documents exhibit basically a plurality of article gripping members in correspondence of the elastic hem. The members are mounted on a support movable between a station for gripping the articles unloaded from a device which set them in a predetermined orientation, and a release station in correspondence of the machine receiving these articles.
These documents do not teach how to overcome the above mentioned drawback.